The Supreme Court of Vermont Law Blog: An on-going conversation about the practice of law in Vermont, featuring summaries of Vermont Supreme Court decisions, a dollop of lampooning, legal analysis, and a charming aggregation of creative thought.

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Saturday, February 1, 2014

Steal Away

RM, RM, and CM are siblings who have had it rough. Originally raised in Winooski, the three
became subject to a child in need of supervision (CHINS) petition. This process was suspended when they left the
state with their mother who moved them all to Pennsylvania. Things did not work out well, and the three
were sent back to an adult brother in Vermont.

Once the state found out about their return, the CHINS
proceeding resumed, and mother and father stipulated to a determination that
the children were CHINS. This meant that
the children were put into foster care, and the state was charged with creating
a permanency plan. The State’s plan was
simple. Mother needed to complete four
steps (including securing stable, appropriate housing and seeking mental health
treatment) and the children would be reunified with her. The trial court agreed and adopted the plan,
which called for a six-month time-frame.

Six months came and went, and mother had not made a great
deal of progress on her goals. So the
state filed to modify the plan. The new
plan called for mother to meet the same four goals and still set reunification
as the goal, but it also included a backup plan that if mother was not
progressing after six months, the state would seek to terminate parental rights
and find permanent foster homes.

Mother appealed this decision, and the SCOV’s first and
biggest question is whether such a modification constituted a final decision,
which would give rise to an appeal. The
SCOV after considering the various issues involved determines that such a
decision is in fact a final judgment and gives rise to an appeal. This is consistent with the SCOV’s prior
permanency planning decisions and makes sense since the next step in this
process will be a trial to determine which plan to follow (based mainly on the
question of whether mother has met or made substantial progress on her four
goals) and not a re-litigation of the plans themselves.

With this decision made, the bulk of the decision is
done. The SCOV quickly notes that the
trial court’s decision was supported by the evidence, which showed that the
children needed a stable, permanent environment and could not sustain further
jostling back and forth between mother and foster care.

In brief, it was in the best interests of the children that
some permanent situation be arranged and implemented. In the face of this type of evidence,
mother’s concerns that the time line was too short and was setting her up for
failure are not enough to shift things the necessary conclusions.

So mother will hopefully make the changes necessary to keep
her children, but as mother senses, and we can suspect given her history, this
is likely not enough to overcome the momentum that arises when a dysfunctional
family tries to cure itself of its ills on a narrow timeline.

1 comment:

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